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Humor

As I sputtered toward the local metropolis Sunday afternoon, I spotted an animal carcass on the side of the road. Nothing unusual there, but tied to the foreleg of the white-tailed deer was a silvery foil balloon festooned with the words “Get Well Soon,” not unlike that pictured above.

Once I comprehended the words on the balloon I started laughing raucously, and asked my daughters if they’d caught a glimpse of the decidedly optimistic note attached to the lifeless ruminant.

Daughter No. 4, blessed with her father’s cynical sense of humor, immediately found the above image on the Internet, and soon we were all laughing.

This not only surprised me but made me swell a bit with pride. Maybe I’m doing something right.

So after a recent mass she approached the parish priest and inquired about if she could assist with mass.

I later asked how it went: “So, are you going to be an altar server?”

“No, not an altar server, but something else,” she replied. “I’m not sure what it’s called exactly. Does ‘crucifier’ sound right?”

I couldn’t help but immediately burst into laughter.

Crucifer leading procession into church. ‘Crucifier’ not pictured.

“No,” I said after a good 20 seconds of cackling, “that doesn’t sound quite right, Sweetheart. The Church really isn’t into crucifying anyone, especially considering what happened, oh, about 2,000 years ago. ‘Crucifier’ sounds more like a rock band or the name of an enforcer. You could be Caroline the Crucifier.”

“Well,” she replied, waving off my remark, “it’s something like that. Whatever it’s called, they want me to carry the cross into church at the start of mass because I’m tall.”

The word she was searching for was “crucifer” so she really wasn’t too far off. A crucifer carries the processional cross into church at the beginning of mass and out at the end.

Of course, I said I was proud of her for showing an interest in participating, but only Daughter No. 3 would come up with “crucifier” as a potential church duty.

There’s no doubting televangelist Joel Osteen’s appeal to millions of Christians. The senior pastor of the largest Protestant church in the US, Osteen’s televised sermons are seen by more than 20 million viewers monthly in more than 100 countries, and he has written five New York Times bestselling books.

The Texas-based preacher has been lauded for touting God’s love for humanity, efforts to inspire others to overcome personal setbacks and emphasis on the need for mission and purpose in life.

Similarly, Osteen has been criticized for his simplistic black-and-white thinking, being a theological lightweight and applying Scripture out of context.

While I generally keep my distance from televangelists and megachurches, I will also readily admit to not being able to see into the hearts of others.

I can’t determine, in this case, whether Osteen is a well-intentioned individual who is doing his best, and has very likely provided solace to a significant number of people, or if he is part preacher, part carnival barker who has used his ability in the pulpit to enrich himself.

Take the above image. If government officials needed money to create a device that could translate bird-speak so that it was intelligible to humans, then required additional cash to develop a way-back machine in order to go to the above point in the past, so that they could interpret what our two feathered juvenile delinquents were saying to one another, that is a project with which I would have absolutely no issue.

Are they discussing where to steal birdseed? What’s the best place to perch their rear ends and “roost?” Where the “easy” chickadees hang out? We just don’t know, and that, at least in my opinion, is one of modern science’s great failings.

Just think, if this pair were a little bigger and had opposable thumbs, they’d probably be ruling the planet by now.

And don’t tell me this image was photoshopped. I for one am prepared to hail our new avian overlords.

(Required disclaimer: I in no way condone underage smoking among fish, fowl or other beasts of the wild, and hope these two fledglings got a sound thrashing when they returned to their nest.)

The below may or may not have appeared in a British newspaper as a letter to the editor. I came across it on a local webpage, Wrisley.com, that included a screenshot of the newspaper clipping from one Peter White of Derbyshire titled “My own social media,” which does give it a bit more credence.

Whatever the case, it’s good for a laugh:

SIR: I haven’t got a computer, but I was told about Facebook and Twitter and am trying to make friends outside of Facebook and Twitter while applying the same principles.

Every day, I walk down the street and tell passers-by what I have eaten, how I feel, what I have done the night before and what I will do for the rest of the day. I give them pictures of my wife, my daughter and of me gardening and on holiday, spending time by the pool. I also listen to their conversations, tell them I ‘like’ them and give them my opinion on every subject that interests me… whether it interests them or not.

And it works. I have already four people following me: two police officers, a social worker and a psychiatrist.

The above seems plausible enough. I was once in high school and undoubtedly penned a number of bad analogies, though I also recall having considerable difficulty differentiating analogies, metaphors and similes from one another.

While most of my analogies were sports-related – “the sound his head made as it bounced off the pavement was a sharp thwack, resembling the tone of a Nolan Ryan fastball being fouled off by Reggie Jackson” – and many were substandard, they probably weren’t as cringe-worthy as the above.

But, of course, the Internet being the Internet, it turns out that the above analogies weren’t written by high school students but by readers of the Washington Post.

In July 1995 the Post ran a contest asking for outrageously bad analogies, according to the blog Socratic Mama. Readers were asked to write the most hideous prose they could imagine. The above is a selection of those submissions.

It wasn’t long before a sample of these were being gleefully passed around the web, attributed to high school students.

I suppose because nearly all of us were high school students at one time, and most of us have struggled with analogies – at least in practice if not theory – the idea that teens could come up with the above seems utterly plausible.

After all, high school students struggle with analogies in much the same way that a thirsty, yet dignified souse struggles not to break into a trot when he hears a beer truck has overturned just up the road.

To see the Post’s collection of reader-inspired bad analogies, click here.

While North Adams authorities declined to identify the intoxicated wannabe frontiersman or his ursine prey, they explained the consequences of such actions while admitting the affair left them just a tad bewildered.

“We certainly don’t need anyone going all Davy Crockett chasing (a bear) through the woods drunk with a dull hatchet,” the Facebook post continued. “It is just a bad idea and not going to end well. It will however, certainly end you up in jail … which it did. The hatchet man was taken into protective custody due to his incapacitation from the consumption of alcoholic beverage. We are still trying to figure out his end game.